New York, March 5, 2026, 10:32 EST
Palantir Technologies is working to remove Anthropic’s Claude from a Pentagon-facing version of its Maven Smart Systems after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the government to stop working with Anthropic, according to two people familiar with the matter. The people said Palantir may need months to replace Claude and rebuild parts of the software tied to Maven-related work. 1
Maven pulls together data from multiple sources to flag military points of interest and speed intelligence analysts’ work. Swapping out an embedded AI model is not a quick plug-and-play change, and the Pentagon has been leaning harder on such systems. 2
Trump announced a federal agency-wide ban on Anthropic on Feb. 27 with a six-month phaseout, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said military contractors should not conduct “commercial activity” with the company. Contract lawyers said defense suppliers are likely to comply anyway; Lockheed Martin said it would follow the direction and expects “minimal impacts,” while General Dynamics and Raytheon parent RTX declined to comment. 3
Palantir shares were up about 0.7% at $154.20 as of 10:18 a.m. EST, valuing the company at about $433 billion.
Maven Smart Systems uses “prompts” — written instructions fed to an AI model — and other workflows built using Claude code, the two people familiar said. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, speaking this week at a defense tech conference in Washington, warned that Silicon Valley firms that take white-collar jobs and also “screw the military” could invite “the nationalization of our technology.” 4
A major tech industry group told Hegseth it was concerned by the Pentagon’s consideration of a supply-chain risk designation in response to a procurement dispute. In a letter dated Wednesday, Information Technology Industry Council CEO Jason Oxman wrote that emergency designations are for “genuine emergencies” and that stripping parts of existing solutions would be a “complex endeavor.” 5
But the rules around how far the Pentagon can push contractors may end up in court, and that could leave companies rewriting systems for a policy that shifts again. Anthropic has said it would challenge any supply-chain risk designation, and some investors have pushed the company to contain fallout with the Pentagon as talks continue, people familiar with the discussions said. 6
Claude is a large language model — software trained on vast amounts of text to generate responses to prompts. In defense systems, replacing one model with another can ripple through interfaces, safety checks, and security reviews.
Palantir built its business selling data-analysis tools to governments and companies, and Maven has tied it more closely to U.S. defense modernization. The immediate question is how quickly Palantir can cut over to a new model without disrupting a platform the Pentagon has treated as central to its AI push.
